President denies request for release of minutes from crucial 2015 meeting
President Katerina Sakellaropoulou has rejected a request from the minor populist party Course of Freedom (Plefsi Eleftherias) to release the minutes of a crucial meeting of political party leaders held after Greeks voted by a large margin to reject the austerity terms of an aid package from international creditors in 2015.
“The council of political leaders is an informal body whose formation and operation are not regulated by the Constitution or legislation,” the president said in a release on Monday. She said that, given the nature of the body and the sensitive topics discussed in closed-door meetings, “it can be inferred that these discussions are primarily confidential.”
“Whenever the Council has convened in the past, minutes have never been made public. Only a joint communique is issued,” she explained.
Sakellaropoulou also remarked that “a reasonable period of time” has not yet elapsed since the meeting on July 6, 2015, though she did not specify what that timeframe would be.
The motivations behind the request by Course of Freedom, which was formally made a month ago, remain unclear. Party leader Zoe Konstantopoulou, a former Parliament speaker and SYRIZA MP, has argued that the public deserves to know what was discussed behind closed doors that day. Analysts suggest her goal is to expose former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who, shortly after the “No” vote of over 61% in the July 5 referendum, reversed course and accepted the austerity demands of creditors as a condition for keeping Greece in the eurozone.
Konstantopoulou had been a staunch supporter of the “No” vote and left SYRIZA after Tsipras’ U-turn. She formed her own party in 2016. Tsipras stepped down as SYRIZA leader last year.
The council in question was attended by then-president Prokopis Pavlopoulos, leftist premier Tsipras and his nationalist coalition partner and defense minister Panos Kammenos, interim New Democracy leader Evangelos Meimarakis, late PASOK leader Fofi Gennimata, Greek Communist Party (KKE) Secretary-General Dimitris Koutsoumbas, and then-leader of the now-defunct To Potami party Stavros Theodorakis.
The six-hour meeting was reportedly interrupted several times to allow Tsipras to speak with key foreign leaders, including then-French president Francois Hollande, then-German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Tsipras is said to have come under great pressure to reach an agreement with European creditors to avoid a Grexit. Pavlopoulos had at the time emphasized that “we cannot conceive of Greece outside of Europe and the eurozone,” and he urged European partners to recognize that Europe would be different without Greece.
“The recent verdict of the Greek people does not constitute a mandate for rupture but a mandate to continue and strengthen efforts to achieve a socially just and economically viable agreement,” stated the joint communique issued after the meeting. The Communist leader was the only one who did not sign the document.
